What's behind rising disenchantment among partners at the Big Four?

The leadership funnel gets narrow at top of the firms and with number of partners increasing every year, the chances of upward movement get slimmer for most partners.

KPMG’s high-profile tax leader Girish Vanvari quit recently to start his own firm. The entrepreneurship bug bit him, of course, but it was as much as case of the weariness of a routine high-pressure job catching up with him.

From the outside, Vanvari — often referred to as ‘the hardest working man in any Big Four’ — didn’t seem to have any issues as he was rainmaker helping KPMG’s tax practice grow, had an impeccable market reputation, and was even in the running for the firm’s top job. But he wasn’t enjoying work anymore as incessant travel, people issues, and administrative work kept increasing.

“The management part in these roles kept increasing,” Vanvari, 46, said. “I had an opportunity of being a partner at a very early stage, I was leading a tax practice of over 2,000 people. But then, after a while, I started thinking, now I want to live my dream,” he told ET.

There are tens of such highly successful partners in the Big Four accounting and consultancy firms Ernst & Young, Deloitte, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers, increasingly choosing to branch out on their own or jump ships to pick up client-focused jobs, experts say. Call it ‘partner fatigue’ — a combination of factors in the high pressure Big Four environment is leading partners to either quit, get disenchanted, or simply enter survival mode.

“Partners from the Big Four accounting firms do not want to be chasing revenues and targets. They want to join quality firm with a client first culture and not be boxed into pressure cooker situations. It is for this reason that our firm (Dhruva) has always had more people willing to join us than what we can absorb’ says Dhruva CEO Dinesh Kanabar, who himself quit KPMG to set up Dhruva with a number of partners.

Take the case of Abhishek Goenka, a rising star in PwC who was recently promoted to a national leadership role and asked to manage a team of about 1,000 professionals, including about 30 partners. However, after a few days of taking over his new role, he suddenly quit and joined shared office space provider CoWrks of RMZ Group. “The traditional consulting roles tend to be super specialised; I wanted to be part of an exciting journey in a business role,” said Goenka, 45, who is now CFO at CoWrks and CEO at RMZ Family Office.

So, what are the factors driving successful partners to walk out of high-profile Big Four roles?

Experts say there are issues at industry level, firm level, and some at individual level. Stiff targets, constant travel, high delivery pressure, intra-firm and intra-vertical competition, office politics, and limited growth opportunity once one enters partnership…all these factors take a toll on partners.

“Instead of focusing on clients, I spend a lot of my time managing team issues and talking to internal stakeholders both local and international,” said a national head in one of the Big Four. “My old clients are complaining, and I am not doing what I like and what made me successful,” the person said on condition of anonymity.

Also, the trend of specialisation is making work boring and repetitive for many Big Four partners, no matter what fancy designation they have. “The size of the Big Four is such that every partner is a super specialisation specialist and titles like national head mean nothing,” said a Big Four partner who quit recently. “You are expected to do same old thing, plus manage an army of ambitious and insecure executives,” the person said.

Plus, each of the Big Four firms is under pressure due to its unique problems that translate into pressure on its partners.

If EY carries the burden of market leadership and defending its market share in a hyper-competitive sector, Deloitte is in the middle of pivoting from an audit heavy firm to a consulting dominant model and KPMG has seen major leadership turmoil for some time now. In the case of PwC, just when the firm was hitting 20% plus yearly growth rates market regulator Sebi banned the firm from auditing listed firms for two years for failing to spot the Rs 9,000-crore Satyam Computer fraud as its auditor.

Given the strong growth the Big Four firms have witnessed, partnerships have also grown to levels where new partners are feeling lost. EY has 430 plus partners currently, up from a little over 200 three years ago. As of today, there are 1,550-1,570 partners in the Big Four firms, up from 700-725 three years back.

The leadership funnel gets narrow at top of the firms and with number of partners increasing every year, the chances of upward movement get slimmer for most partners.

And there are those who quit for a better life. “I have two houses in Gurgaon, I drive an expensive German car, my two kids are in US colleges, and I have enough investments to carry me through life,” said a service line national head in one of the Big Four. “My close friend recently quit everything to go learn Scuba diving in Thailand. It has set me thinking, is this the life I want?” the person said.

Women partners face a different kind of pressure. “Not only we have to fight biases like, ‘oh it’s easy to become a partner if you are a woman these days’, at work…we have to even bear with snide comments like, ‘what kind of a mother misses her teenage daughter’s arangetram (debut stage performance in classical dance or music) because she is busy at work’,” said a partner with one of the Big Four firms.

Insiders said most partners would like something that Big Four offices in the US and Europe offer — an option to become a principal. “His revenue targets are halved, but so is his salary,” said an indirect tax partner with a Big Four. “This is a win-win for both partners, who now have more time, and the firm too, as it stopped a smart employee from quitting,” said the person, who narrated the agony of sitting with his angry wife in his car’s backseat after he failed to attend a musical evening planned with her.

An old partner on the verge of retirement has watched this contagion spread turns philosophical. “I see a lot of young partners in our firm suddenly turn to spirituality at 40 when the first brush of mortality hits them or they get a younger boss,” he laughs.

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